Asus P5Q-E

The P5Q-E is the upper-mainstream P45 motherboard by Asus, offering decent features and Asus’s controversial EPU power saving feature. We will look into that in a separate comparison.

The eight phase voltage regulators are kept cool by copper heat sinks—four of them connected to the northbridge heat sink by a heat pipe. Asus also supports DDR2 memory with support for 1066 and 1200 speeds, dual Gigabit Ethernet ports and a Firewire controller. This is the only motherboard in this roundup that is not ready to run two PCI Express graphics cards. Instead, the single x16 slot monopolizes all 16 lanes running at PCIe 2.0 speeds.

Asus’ Express Gate stands for the feature-limited operating system Splashtop by DeviceVM, which is capable of booting in as little as five seconds. This feature launches a Linux OS and a browser, sufficient to check email or to chat. Thanks to Flash support, you can even watch videos on YouTube or other platforms. However, since the Express Gate Splashtop OS is launched from within the Flash ROM, it is not possible to make changes or to store anything except bookmarks.